A system modelling autophagy is a new area of research. Current understanding
of each step in this biochemical pathway is limited. The study of this mechanism is
interesting in several aspects: autophagy plays an important role in physiological
cellular processes, is a survival mechanism under external stress and is also connected
with cancer and neurodegenerative diseases [Cuervo, 2004; Kondo et al., 2005; Levine,
2007; Pan et al., 2008].
Autophagy is the pathway for degradation of redundant or faulty cell
components. This important mechanism occurs in all eukaryotic cells as a part of cell’s
everyday activities and plays an important role in cell growth and development (cellular
differentiation, immunity, cellular homeostasis).
This work proposes a simple mathematical model of autophagy pathway as a
system with feedback, which controls the level of the total amino acid pool. Feedback
comes from the amino acids which are produced during the autophagy mechanism
which is induced as a result of starvation or rapamycin treatment
